WFMU's Beware of the Blog

Alasdair MacLean (of the Clientele)

In late October Alasdair MacLean, singer-guitarist-composer of the London-based Clientele, crossed the pond for two U.S. appearances—one on WFMU. He was flown transatlantic sans band to promote the new Clientele album, a parlor-pop suite titled Bonfires on the Heath. Bonfires comprises a haunting song cycle graced with falling leaves and foreboding twilight. On his blog, "From Brighton Beach to Santa Monica," MacLean confesses that his work is shadowed by "mental distress and paranoia." There are less benign ways to channel despair.

On my Oct 28 program, MacLean serenaded listeners with a quavery voice over shimmering Rickenbacker. The following night he played Joe's Pub in NYC accompanied by a piano-cello-trumpet ensemble.

About the limited U.S. itinerary, MacLean observed: "A friend once told me that Stephin Merritt was being flown from New York to London solely to 'do press.' This seemed impossibly glamorous. They fly you to a different country and put you in a hotel just so you can talk to people — about YOURSELF! You must have some weighty pronouncements to make to the world if that’s how you're being treated. Better greet the journalists with a faintly melancholy smile (oh, the loneliness of genius, the weight of one's towering intellect) and an honest, if distracted, handshake." In fact, this Prince of Looming Darkness was agreeableness personified: a gentleman and a pro, in good humor.

MacLean's reverb-drenched strumming resonated in some deeper recess, which sparked an epiphany the following day. Speaking to Alasdair briefly after the Joe's set, I asked if he was familiar with the work of Vini Reilly, the legendary Manchester guitarist who performs and records as The Durutti Column. Alasdair smiled and admitted he was a fan. Offered a favorable comparison, he demurred, conceding, "I wish I could play as good as him."

On WFMU, MacLean performed five Clientele songs (mp3s from WFMU's Free Music Archive):

July 4th pin-up: hot fox diplomacy

Current occupation: Governor of Alaska
Age: 45
Residence: Wasilla, Alaska

Little-known public official interviewed in the August 2009 issue of Runner's World magazine:

"I feel so crappy if I go more than a few days without running. I have to run. No matter how rotten I feel before or during a run, it's always worth it to me afterwards. Sweat is my sanity. A great frustration I had during the campaign was when the McCain staff wouldn't carve out time for me to go for a run. The days never went as well if I couldn't get out there and sweat. ...

"I went for a run at John McCain's ranch a couple of days before the debate with Joe Biden. My favorite thing in the world is to run on hot, dusty roads. I don't get enough of that in Alaska. So I was in heaven and there were plenty of hills so I knew my thighs were going to just throb and my lungs were going to burn and that's what I crave."

Palin intends to continue running because she feels a commitment.

Memorial Day, 2009

We live in the Land of the Free — because it's the Home of the Brave.

I don't know much about PFC Gerald J. Walker, except what it says on the plaque (at left), which is installed over a doorway in the weight room of the Hoboken YMCA. Next month he would have turned 60. He died at 20, in uniform.

Because of the memorial's placement, everyone who stops in for a workout is reminded of Gerard Walker's sacrifice. Amid the Cybex machines, barbell racks, and treadmills, it's a haunting memento.

The Y is closed for Memorial Day, but the plaque is on duty.

Some songs for Memorial Day (all posted as mp3):

Tan Sleeve: "American Blood" (2005, courtesy songwriter Lane Steinberg)

Bo Diddley: "Ain't It Good to Be Free" (1983)

Elton Britt: "There's A Star-Spangled Banner Waving Somewhere" (1942)

Do something patriotic with your money today:

Soldier's Angels

Injured Marine Semper Fi Fund

Paralyzed Veterans of America

Welcome Back Veterans

Maria Levitsky: Building Photographs

Our talented (and exceedingly modest) radio compatriot Maria Levitsky (formerly heard 3-6pm Wednesday afternoons) is crafty with a camera. Her premiere NYC photographic gallery exhibit, Building Photographs, opens this evening at Deborah Berke & Partners Architects (220 5th Avenue, 7th floor) with a reception from 6:30 to 8:30. (Levitsky has previously exhibited in several Brooklyn venues and around the country.)

Dozens of black & white and experimental works can be viewed at MariaLevitsky.com. At left: Shoes on Stairs (Invisible Ascending), silver gelatin print from 2000.

Some of Maria's photos are spooky—one of many qualities I find appealing. Her works often frame scenic ruins marking time before the inevitable wrecking ball. This decaying architecture reveals few signs of life—but many signs of former lives (what Levitsky calls "evidence of disappearance").

Building Photographs runs through the summer by appointment.

Lou D'Antonio (1936-2009)

Lou D'Antonio, longtime host of The Hour of the Duck, passed away on March 28 in Vermont at age 72.

Lou joined the station in 1962, six years before the advent of free-form, hosting an eclectic jazz program. When free-form was introduced by a gaggle of hippies (including Vin Scelsa) in '68, Lou (a self-described "clean-cut, preppie type") made the open-playlist transition seamlessly. He remained an iconic figure at WFMU until he retired in 1990.

Everyone in the WFMU community owes Lou a silent debt of gratitude for keeping free-form radio alive when the underground format was being overtaken by niche-casting in the early 1970s.

Drawing on his early radio heroes Jean Shepherd, Bob & Ray, and Symphony Sid, Lou evolved a warm, erudite, self-effacing, and highly entertaining style. His joie de vivre on mic was no stage persona. Lou was the same charismatic individual on the air and off.

Radio personality. Storyteller. Bon vivant. Zen sage. Family man. Actor. Athlete. Hepcat. Historian. Philosopher. Humorist. Chef. Musician. Teacher. Epicure. Diplomat. Mediator. Mentor. Lou was Fred Astaire -- he was multi-talented, did everything with singular style and natural grace, and made it all look easy.

Photos of Lou and reminiscences from staff and volunteers are being posted on WFMU's In Memoriam page, which includes a link (at bottom) to the D'Antonio family's memorial at Facebook. The first two hours of my April 8 afternoon program were devoted to Lou. An audio archive of the Duck's vintage broadcasts is under construction.

Andy Breckman: Beyond Poco

It's a running gag on Seven Second Delay that Andy Breckman's music tastes run no deeper than Poco and Jackson Browne. But like his faux misanthropy and staged insults (fact: he IM's an apology to each caller after every show), Andy's alleged musical Philistinism is a riff. His iPod shuffle reflects a more eclectic appetite than 90% of the station's sneering, insecure poseurs. Andy's tastes are so adventurous that he endures charges of parochialism on 7SD because he doesn't need to prove anything. The evidence is readily available online in the playlists of the long-running, if episodic program, Go To Hell! With Andy Breckman.

Over the years, Andy has hosted dozens of last-minute WFMU fill-ins, usually during off-hours, with little fanfare. As his archives indicate, the real Andy Breckman is a musical connoisseur, a sonic bon vivant, an audio omnivore. From psychedelia to show tunes, from snotty L.A. punk to hip-hop, from Ethiopique to breezy Tin Pan Alley, from Senegalese Mbalax to free jazz -- if it can be ripped, one-clicked at Amazon, or downloaded from a blog in Thailand, it will end up in Andy's earbuds, and eventually on WFMU's airwaves.

The tragedy of Andy's career as a DJ is that, due to an unfortunate confluence of archiving software glitches, server crashes, accidental file deletions, and vindictive hackers (including several rival DJs), audio exists for just one show (April 1, 2009). However, meticulously annotated set-lists handwritten by Andy on Post-It pads have helped WFMU document every segue from every program he's hosted since 1994. These playlists chronicle his genre-surfing musical Odysseys: there are thoughtful concept shows, clever song threads, and sets that reflect a surprising commitment to eco-awareness. Andy's tribute to the 1967 Summer of Love offers a vault of nuggets so obscure that not only do these relics not appear on any other WFMU staffer's playlist, they can't be Googled without circling back to Andy's archives.

Though the audio of these programs has been lost, there is a rabid following for Andy's singular brand of broadcasting. His shows are so deeply revered that obsessive fans have recreated many of his famous playlists as BitTorrent distributed files. It goes without saying that these music-only compilations aren’t the same without Andy's snarky commentary and mic breaks punctuated by droll rape analogies.

This Is A Taco

A second freakshow video from the Bran Flakes, "Do You Want Salad With Your Taco?," in advance of their forthcoming Illegal Art CD, I Have Hands. Animation by Susan DeLint. The Flakes CD drops Feb. 24.

In an unrelated matter, This Is A Song, helpfully diagrammed by Mitch Friedman.

And you may be intrigued to know that decades before Songsmith, aspiring composers used the now all-but-forgotten Harrington 1200.

The Bran Flakes video

Pesky WFMU playlist termites The Bran Flakes have launched a new animated video ("What It's All About") in conjunction with the February 24 release of their album, I Have Hands (Illegal Art).

Animation by TBF's Sir Mildred Pitt. Shouts to fellow Flake Otis Fodder, who quit smoking last Friday "after 25+ years of a pack every day or two."

"Right now I am tettering on the edge of sanity," Otis reports. "It's been 72 hours and my smoking days are over. Yes yes. But where shall I go? Maybe smoking was my talent. Shoot me."

The libertarian case for Obama

Tom Smith has me reconsidering my vote:

"With some gratitude I realize that all the talk of Hope and Change can be distilled into a two-fold message that is both direct and pure:  If Obama is elected President, the government will give me money.  And second, that would be fair. ...

"Indeed, the prospect of getting more money does inspire in me a feeling I recognize as hope, and it would certainly be a welcome change.  Like many Americans, I get paid every month, and every month I pay bills.  I am struck by the frequency and intensity of the feeling that I could use more money.  This would be a change I could believe in. ...

"Some longtime readers may object that this endorsement represents a rejection of every principle I have ever stood for.  This may be true. However, I would ask them to consider that standing up for principles against an enthusiastic mob is a good way to make yourself very unpopular. ...

"I do admit I am a little worried about Ahmedwhatshisname getting nukes and Putin rolling into Europe, with only Obama's charisma to stop them.  I had never really thought of let's all play nicely together as a foreign policy since it doesn't even work with kids.  But hey, is that really my problem? He has like a zillion brilliant foreign policy advisers and I'm sure they'll figure something clever out.  I can no longer afford a trip to Israel anyway and I assume pictures of it will be archived on the internet."

Dead Tree Media Die-Off Watch

Mark Twain: "If you don't read the newspaper, you are uninformed; if you do read the newspaper, you are misinformed."

I stopped reading newspapers about ten years ago. I'm not alone. To borrow a passage from Thomas Wolfe, reapplied to the major dailies: "That nothing out of the effort of their lives grew younger, better, or more beautiful, that all was erased in a daily wash of sewage."

"I'm glad you're fired up!"

Pssst -- Almighty Messiah ... a little respect over here, please.

So this doesn't happen again.

Dummygate

'tarded bitch!

She should learn to use a dictionerry.

Can you believe they put such a ditz on the ticket?

If a hippie screams in the forest, does a tree hear it?

Someone tell the NY Times what their daily print run is doing to these people.

Heavenly Sounds in Hi-Fi

Lou Teicher, one-half of legendary piano duo Ferrante & Teicher, passed away yesterday at 83. His manager, Scott Smith, said that "Lou's death was unexpected -- the result of a heart attack at Lou and [wife] Betty's summer home in North Carolina." F&T were the 1,600-lb. gorillas of snoozemeistering schmaltz—non-intrusive musical wallpaper that was paradoxically ignorable yet sold billions.

However, their 1950s prepared piano pop (released on a half-dozen LPs before the duo achieved commercial success) was groundbreaking and still sounds ear-bending. During this developmental period, the Juilliard grads were renowned for experimental performance techniques and atonal modalities. Their prepared piano (a phrase coined by John Cage) involved wedging wood, metal, and debris in the piano strings to mute tones and create percussive effects. They would also reach into the piano frame during a duet and dampen strings with their fingers.

F&T performed a number of times on the old Ernie Kovacs TV show. Here's a clip of the boys performing "Oye Negra."

People Should Play, Machines Should Do The Work

On March 12, a compulsively dedicated and immensely talented Raymond Scott devotee named Adam O'Callaghan directed and performed in a monumental cross-genre Scott centenary concert at Concordia University, Montreal. O'Callaghan recruited 50 or so acoustic and electronic musicians — students and professionals — in various ensemble settings.

The program offered repertoire from Scott's 1937-39 cartoon-jazz and 1948-49 chamber-jazz Quintets; orchestral works; the composer's elegant but rarely heard 1950 Suite for Violin & Piano; tunes from the idiosyncratic 1960 Secret Seven album; and pioneering proto-electronica from Manhattan Research Inc. and Soothing Sounds for Baby. The proceedings included re-enactments of Scott's 1950s electronic TV commercials and a rhapsodic replica of a Space Age Scott invention, The Fascination Machine. The concert was a mind-boggler, never likely to be duplicated. Dozens of performance videos from the concert are on YouTube.

One performance (just posted) was particularly stunning and unexpected — a surprise collaborator accompanying the trio Unireverse on Scott's electronic lullaby, "Sleepytime" (from Soothing Sounds). The guest arrives onstage three minutes into the performance.

Mambo 4 Woofmoo

Artist Jim Flora probably never listened to WFMU. He was a fan of Bix and bebop (i.e., foot-tapping jazz) and the Budapest String Quartet, none of which garners heavy rotation on our "free-form" airwaves. Yet Flora unknowingly contributed to WFMU's visual identity several times in recent years. His cartoonish figures have appeared on a station t-shirt, hoodie, bumper sticker, and Marathon mailer, as well as an oversized canvas banner displayed hither and yon.

Flora wasn't aware of these adaptations of his work because he passed away ten years ago today at age 84.

The images were used by WFMU designers thru arrangement with the Flora family, with whom I've worked for several years archiving and cataloging the artist's vast (and largely uncirculated) fine art collection. Flora's 1955 Mambo For Cats LP cover (re-purposed at left by co-archivist Barbara Economon) is one of his most iconic illustrations. Flora's hyperactive gremlins frolicked across dozens of quirky album covers for Columbia in the 1940s and RCA Victor in the 1950s. Today his work adorns new CDs.

Metropolis "can finally be understood"

Footage missing from Fritz Lang's 1927 classic Metropolis have been discovered in Buenos Aires.

Upon its initial release, according to Zeitmagazin, "the film flopped with critics and audiences alike. Representatives of the American firm Paramount considerably shortened and re-edited the film. They oversimplified the plot, even cutting key scenes. The original version could only be seen in Berlin until May 1927 – from then on it was considered to have been lost forever."

Now, will someone please find the missing reels of Greed, another commercial debacle?

HT: Don Brockway

The Way We Were

Does this mean he's a revisionist?

Somebody say "boat"?

Shield in the shadows

Robert Crumb is a curmudgeon nonpareil, and a man of idiosyncratic fetishes. One of them is the music of Leroy Shield. Until the 1990s, Shield, a prolific composer/conductor most of his life (1893-1962), was relatively unknown for what was arguably his greatest musical achievement: composing hundreds of themes for the 1930s Hal Roach comedies of Laurel & Hardy and The Little Rascals. In the early '90s, a Dutch orchestra called The Beau Hunks (christened after a L&H feature) recorded three albums of Shield's compositions from the Roach era, thus reviving a prodigious legacy.

After the Hunks released their first album in 1992, Crumb wrote them a fan letter, exclaiming, "This is music I've been looking for all my life!" He later elaborated: "Shield's music first got me interested in old music. I was hearing it on TV when I was a kid. I searched for that music." His hunt was a predestined dead-end because, until the Hunks recorded the Shield themes, they had never been commercially available. The composer hadn't even received screen credit. Along with legions of Roach film fans, Crumb was elated to discover the reconstructed versions. "It's my favorite music of all time," he affirmed. "I never get tired of it. I guess Shield was not too concerned with getting credit. He just did his job, then went out and played golf. There's a certain kind of Indian shaman that works his magic behind the scenes. I guess that's what Shield was."

Crumb was so enamored of the Beau Hunks' masterful performances of the Shield charts, he rendered a portrait of the composer (at right) and offered it free of charge to the band to use as CD cover art.

Now Steve Cloutier, working with Shield historian/graphic designer Piet Schreuders, has launched a new site devoted to the composer.

"The site's purpose is both a tribute and the means to satisfy a widespread curiosity that many have about the composer," Cloutier emailed. "Piet's diligent research and advice have been the most important ingredients in building this site. Thank heaven the Beau Hunks recorded this wonderful music. Leroy Shield's name could well have slipped into obscurity."

UPDATE (August 10): A short video that demonstrates how Shield's music filtered into your subconscious via Roach comedies.